Friday, July 07, 2006

Life through a fisheye lens

Long story short - mainly because looking at the screen makes me sick right now - I had to have emergency laser eye surgery today. I have a permanent blind spot in the vision of my left eye now that will forever alter how I see things - big black circle and a wavy ripple to everything. But, if I hadn't had this done today, all of my vision in my left eye could have vanished forever in a matter of days.

It was a weird, fluky thing. Could have happened to anyone, apparently. More about this when I'm less emotional about losing a hunk of my field of vision.

I have to relearn how to enjoy reading a book now. :-( And hope this thing doesn't grow back and I lose all my vision in my left eye anyway. It has a 50% regrowth rate.

And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, Sasquatch for taking off the entire day to take me to appointments and let me sob like an idiot in your car.

I'll finish the travelogue when I feel like I can sit in front of the screen without throwing up. This is going to make getting through the workday really hard.

Feeling pretty down, and yet, pretty lucky to not be totally blind in one eye,

Thanks so very much, Heather and loracs! I got up this morning to discover that my face is slightly yellow. I was warned that I could possibly be jaundiced for a couple of days from the injected dye. "It's a rare possibility," I was told.

You are a magnet for odd ailments!Here's hoping your poles aere reversed soon! And I look forward to more travelogue/blog or just writing. I enjoy your style and it is s l o w l y motivating me write. something.Anyway, quick recovery to you!

My goodness! I'm so sorry to hear this. Being the practical sort I wish I could help.

Here are a few things that might help.1) Read Please (www.readplease.com)They have a free product and a pro product. Check out the quality on the AT&T 16 bit voices. This will free you from hard core reading while you are healing. I use it as a proofing tool. It works great and catches a lot of mistakes that I make like typing you instead of your but not noticing it when I read it. You can't miss it when read please reads it back.

2) IE View|text size|larger3) Up the refresh rate on your monitor. It is easier on your eyes.Mine is at 100 MHz. You can change in from your monitor with a right click and then properties then click on monitor tab and then refresh frequencies. You will have a even better experience if you make sure your monitor has the most recent drivers and your video card does too. The monitor button also has a check box for the refresh frequencies so it only displays the ones your monitor can handle. That is why you should get the exact right drivers for your video card and monitor FIRST and then set the refresh rate to a higher number. Some computers come set with a lower refresh rate because it assumes you have a 'generic' monitor. But you probably have the ability to go to 100 vs. 75 or 60 which is often the default.

And as the lovely and tasteful Cyn said, I'm not a virtual hugs kind of person either so I'll just say,"Live long and prosper."Good luck!SpockoP.S. If you like having bigger text you can also get a full size sheet magnifier for paperback reading! I got mine at Borders Books for 9.99. And if you want it for you computer you can changer the over all screen area to 720 x 567 if that helps or there are also program that increase the size of things on the screen.

Holy hell, well, at least I'm glad you caught it before it got worse, but wow, sorry to hear about this.

I hope that I'm correct that you're one of the few that we could count on to have the gumption and perserverance to come back from this kind of thing.

So take it easy during this recovery and adjustment, as we don't want you to be nauseous just for the sake of our reading enjoyment... but we, your blog-o-fans, certainly all look forward to that full re-learning and recovery.

It seems that the karmic fates seem to owe you a whole bunch of good stuff from here on out!

Jesus, merujo, could the fates possibly kick you more while you're down?! Man, this upsets me that you are going through this. Wish there was something I could do - eyesight is such a precious thing. I'm sending you two big 'ol hugs!